Re: [d@DCC] Wacky world of the world wide wobble.

From: Russell McOrmond <russell _-at-_ flora.ca>
To: "General Copyright Discussions \(questions, organizing, etc\)" <discuss (at) list.digital-copyright.ca>
Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2006 17:26:17 -0500
References: <458C9A8B.3050400@TelecomOttawa.net>

   It's important to watch these things and remember just how 'squishy' 
the law is, and that judges are just as likely to make mistakes as 
anyone else.  The law is not like software, where once you 'test' your 
code you will know how it will be run on other hardware.  This is a 
lower court judge, and I hope this will be appealed as it is a nonsense 
judgment, but it's the way the current highly fallible legal system works.

Note: It has been interpreted that providing links to something where 
you knew the contents is considered a form of authorization to download 
the file.  If the resulting file is infringing, then you would be 
liable.   This is not the case given the copyright holder of the file is 
the sender of the file, and thus I don't understand the basis of the 
infringement beyond finding a judge who could be confused into not 
understanding how the Web works with inline videos/images/etc.  I didn't 
read the case but the judge might have been confused into believing that 
the other site was an unauthorized derivative of the original work.


   It's sad when people hire incompetent lawyers to argue cases in front 
of incompetent lawyers in order to hide from the fact they hired an 
incompetent webmaster.   A few lines of code would have solved any 
"problem" they had.

   The same type of problem is happening in Canada with the lobbying 
around so-called "Educational use of the Internet".  You see old-economy 
copyright holders that don't understand the difference between "DRM" and 
software that checks for passwords, cookies or referrer-lines in the 
HTTP header of a web request.

See:
Copyright and the Educational Use of Internet Content
Working Group’s Report
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/internet/incrp-prda.nsf/en/rp01115e.html

Specifically 
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/internet/incrp-prda.nsf/en/rp01128e.html
and the complete lack of technical knowledge demonstrated under "Forcing 
the use of TPM".  While the report didn't put a name to the comments, 
I've heard them repeated by André Cornellier who is a photographer with 
extremely little knowledge our community would recognize as technical.

   It is clear that this is nonsense, but this is the type of thing that 
policy makers are hearing every day and they aren't necessarily any more 
technically literate than the people who are making these suggestions.


Charles MacDonald wrote:
> here is a link
> http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=23577219-5544b913210f6c6e8ff6d71d90cbdea1-bf&s=5&fs=0
> to a news story about a judge in textas who says that providing a link
> like this
> http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=23577219-5544b913210f6c6e8ff6d71d90cbdea1-bf&s=5&fs=0
> is copyright infringment..
> 
> I sure would notwant to infringe copyright by providing Hyperlinks.. like
> http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=23577219-5544b913210f6c6e8ff6d71d90cbdea1-bf&s=5&fs=0


-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
  Please help us tell the Canadian Parliament to protect our property
  rights as owners of Information Technology. Sign the petition!
  http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/ict/

  "The government, lobbied by legacy copyright holders and hardware
   manufacturers, can pry my camcorder, computer, home theatre, or
   portable media player from my cold dead hands!"
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